People on the lookout for affordable housing in the Swiss city of Zurich can now opt for a two-person tent on an open balcony offering “a view of the starry evening sky” for just 500 Swiss francs ($540) a month.

Finding a cheap place to rent in Zurich is almost impossible these days, because of the city’s competitive property market, so one resourceful tenant decided to subsidize her own monthly rent by subletting the balcony of her apartment on the open market. The offer includes a waterproof tent complete with an insulating mat, mattress and pillows, as well as access to the apartment’s kitchen, living room and bathroom. Believe it or not, the woman, known only as Sandra, has already had a good response to the ad she posted earlier this month.

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The owner of a severely overweight feline that many have dubbed the world’s fattest cat is facing accusations of animal cruelty for allowing his pet to get so big.

Lyznia the Cat, an Instafamous feline whose adorable face and unenviable figure have earned it over 10,000 followers on the popular social network, recently landed her owner in hot water. After photos of the obese cat started doing the rounds online, her Russian female owner started receiving criticism online for overfeeding her pet and not caring about her wellbeing. However, the woman has since hit back at her critics, saying that Lyznia has been having weight problems ever since she first became pregnant a few years ago.

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A tattoo artist in Thailand has been getting a lot of attention online after it was revealed that he shares his home with eight young wives, all of whom get along great with each other.

Ong Dam Sorot, a young tattoo artist specializing in the traditional yantra style, recently sat down with a popular Thai comedian for an interview about his controversial marital status. Sorot is married not to one woman, but to eight, all of whom live under the same roof and consider themselves one big happy family. On the show, which has so far garnered over 3 million views on YouTube alone, Ong Dam Sorot introduced each of his wives and spoke about how they met. The eight women described their husband as the kindest, most considerate man on Earth and claimed to get along wonderfully.

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A Japanese restaurant has been getting a lot of attention for its unique Miso ramen dish which comes with a soft serve cone melting in the center of the bowl.

If you were to make a list of ingredients that you think best complement Miso ramen, milk and chocolate soft serve probably wouldn’t be at the top. But that just proves you’re not a gourmet visionary, like the people at Franken, a restaurant in Osaka Japan. On January 4th, Franken started selling its unique sweet-and-sour red miso ramen dish with a soft serve cone melting in it. Apparently, they went through many types of desserts, and the soft serve was just unexpectedly compatible with the ramen dish.

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Liang Xiaoqing is China’s most popular “auntie” fashion model, a niche segment aimed at marketing fashion products to middle-aged and elderly women.

Although Liang Xiaoning is only 29-years-old, you’d probably think she was well in her 40s, maybe even her 50s, if you looked at any of her professional modeling photos. She has been working as an “auntie” model since she was 18, trying her best to look distinguished and elegant, but also a lot older than her real age. Her tall figure and round, pleasant face apparently make her the perfect auntie model, and over the years she has perfected the art of posing and displaying the emotions that appeal most to her target audience.

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A Gentiana flower discovered only a couple of years ago in Tibet has been dubbed the world’s shiest flower for its ability to close in as little as seven seconds after being touched.

Chinese scientists recently published a study conducted on four species of Gentiana discovered in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, focusing primarily on the flowers’ ability to quickly respond to being touched. Plants are generally perceived as static organisms, with the only notable exceptions being carnivorous plants capable of movements designed to trap inspects inside. However, the four new species of Gentiana flowers discovered in the plateaus of Tibet have faster reactions than any other plants observed before. According to the above-mentioned study, these flowers can close completely in just 7 seconds. This ability has earned the Gentiana the unofficial title of ‘world’s shiest flower’.

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A team of Japanese high-school students recently won a regional innovation competition with a high-tech device that divides cake and pizza into equal portions every single time.

It’s a problem as old as the world – cutting a round treat into more than two equal parts. You either end up with portions that are not exactly the same size, or you’re left with a smaller extra slice that everyone has their eye on. Well, thanks to the ingenuity of a group of Japanese students from Kundong High School in Japan’s Oita Prefecture, dividing a cake or a pizza into perfectly equal portions need no longer be an issue. They have created a high-tech device that calculates the angle at which the tasty treat needs to be cut, depending on the number of necessary slices.

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Bubbles are fragile structures that only last a few seconds before popping, but a team of scientists has apparently found a way to keep bubbles from bursting for over a year.

Soap bubbles are subject to a series of processes that cause them to pop in a matter of seconds, minutes at best. They lose liquid through evaporation or gravitational drainage, and the gas trapped inside also diffuses through the membrane of soap and water back into the environment. However, a team of scientists at the University of Lille, in France, have been working on ways to address the fragility and ephemerality of bubbles, and they’ve apparently come up with a way of creating bubbles that maintain their shape and size for over a year.

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A Palestinian man who spent 15 years in an Israeli prison recently explained how he was able to father four kids during that time, despite not being able to be intimate with his wife.

Rafat Al-Qarawi was arrested in 2006 for terror activity during the Second Intifada against Israel and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. During that time, he allegedly fathered four children, and in a recent interview with Palestinian Media Watch, he revealed just how he managed to pull that off, despite never being intimate with his wife. Al-Qarawi claimed that he smuggled his sperm out of prison in potato chip bags which were then picked up by his wife and taken straight to an infertility clinic for insemination. His remarks raised some eyebrows in the medical community, as human sperm is known to only last a few seconds, minutes at most, outside the human body.

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A 31-year-old man from the UK works as an “expert waiter” in his spare time, spending hours in long queues on behalf of rich people too busy to do it themselves.

For the last three years, Freddie Beckitt, a historical fiction writer from Fulham, in the United Kingdom, has been supplementing his monthly revenue by working as a professional queuer, waiting in line on behalf of wealthy clients to the tune of £20 ($27) an hour. By virtue of being a Londoner, Beckitt says he has queuing “down to an art” and will easily spend hours standing in line, as long as someone is willing to pay him for it. In fact, he only wishes he could spend more time in queues, so he could turn his service into a full-time job.

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An 87-year-old Iranian man who has been living on the streets and hasn’t taken a bath in almost seven decades recently baffled scientists with his good health.

We first wrote about Amou Haji in 2014, dubbing him ‘the world’s dirtiest man‘. At the time, he was living in a small village in Southern Iran’s Fars province, surviving on roadkill and dirty water, and staying as far from bathwater as possible, thinking it would make him sick. He was 80-years-old at the time and appeared to be in good overall health, despite his questionable hygiene and living conditions. Well, apparently not much has changed since then, as a team of doctors recently conducted a series of tests that showed he was in surprisingly good health.

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Japanese lingerie manufacturer Wacoal recently launched a line of lace boxer briefs for men that are said to be both beautiful and functional.

Lace lingerie doesn’t sound like the most masculine thing ever, but reputed underwear company Wacoal didn’t just jump into this project blindly. In November of last year, they tested the waters of this ultra-niche market by offering the Lace Boxer on Japanese crowdfunding platform Makuake. The company knew it had a winner on its hands when its product smashed its modest crowdfunding goal of 300,000 yen ($2,627.87) by 1,090 percent, earning about 3.27 million yen ($28,578.92) in pledges. The Lace Boxer went straight into production, and now Wacoal offers an entire line that consists of seven colors.

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An 85-year-old man from India’s Bihar state is being investigated after claiming to have received 11 Covid-19 vaccine doses in less than a year.

Brahmdeo Mandal, a retired postman from Bihar’s Madhepura district was stopped from getting what he claimed would have been his 12th Covid-19 shot at the beginning of January. Although it’s unclear how exactly word of Mandal’s vaccination marathon reached authorities, it is believed that he boasted about the positive effects of the repeated jabs on his general health to someone, and they tipped off the police. You see, instead of the terrifying potential side effects touted by anti-vaxers, Brahmdeo Mandal claims that the Covid-19 vaccine has made his ailments, many of them considered normal at his age, disappear.

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Saskatchewan’s Crooked Bush, a small grove of aspen trees that grew in a very unusual way, is a botanical oddity that has fascinated both tourists and scientists for years.

Aspen trees don’t usually grow crooked. Like most other threes, they grow straight up, towards the sun, but not the specimens that make up the Crooked Bush. Located near Hafford, in Canada’s Saskatchewan province, this anomaly is the world’s only known crooked aspen tree grove. The strange appearance of the trees was first observed in the 1940s and it has since attracted thousands of tourists to this place. The advent of the internet only made the Crooked Bush more popular and there is now even a wooden walkway that visitors can use to avoid stepping on new growth.

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Indian police recently arrested a disgruntled charity worker accused of setting fire to a bank branch in Karnataka after being denied a loan.

33-year-old Wasim Hazaratsab Mulla, a charity worker from Haveri, approached state-run Canara Bank for a loan of 1.6 million rupees ($21,600) in December of last year. His application was eventually denied, because of discrepancies in the submitted paperwork which broke the bank’s credit policy. Wasim allegedly didn’t take the news too kindly, riding his motorcycle to the bank branch on Sunday, January 9th, breaking open a window to spray a flammable liquid inside and setting the building on fire.

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